This dissertation examines the topic of money in relation to that of aesthetics in the nineteenth-century novel. It approaches the topic through the work of two roughly contemporary novelists, Emile Zola and Henry James. Through readings of representative novels by each, it argues that represented acts of artistic creation and appreciation, and careers built on such acts, put into play dynamics found in modes of economic activity. Investment, speculation, exploitation, ends-into-means rationality, all find expression within and surrounding the fictional artistic careers we examine. The Zola portion examines his “art” and “money” novels (L’Oeuvre and L’Argent) as a diptych whose titular subjects serve as analogous vehicles of passion, twin outlets for an obsession with creation (placed against images of childbirth) and the quest for personal glory. In the James portion, we find a turn away from the cult of creative genius and the pursuit of glory toward a prizing of patient industry and development in his artist-novels (Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse). By placing uncertain artistic careers (and even uncertain talents) against the temptations of wealth and security—temptations which conceal forms of manipulation and control— these works present the common Jamesian ethic of renunciation as a condition for growth. In The Golden Bowl we explore a hypertrophied faculty of aesthetic valuation applied to human beings—an application which likewise repeats these gestures of domination. We find in these works a shared presentation of the sphere of artistic production and reception as an arena for the warring impulses of economic drives, and a use of the fictional space as a laboratory in which to observe these movements. There emerges out of these studies a subtle insistence that, in art as in life, the only viable path forward lies in the assumption of personal risk, a willingness to expose oneself to failure and loss.